Dragonfly Editorial

3 simple steps to submit an editing request It’s a quiet morning at the office until you realize the deadline for the 50-page proposal is in 2 short days. You need your document edited quickly and precisely. There aren’t enough editors on staff to meet the deadline, but you don’t want to submit it without an edit first. Your head …

Magi Walker’s title at Dragonfly is “Editorial Manager.” But that title only tells part of the story of who Magi is. Here’s the rest. A deeply rooted Southerner, Magi grew up traveling the world, living in Taiwan as a home base, and touching down in exotic locales every summer to visit grandparents Stateside. She discovered a love of different cultures …

Recently, a client sent in an editing request for a 55-page document with 11-point Garamond font and 16-point line spacing. My first reaction: what the heck is 16-point line spacing? For this particular client, we provide an estimate for every project. It’s based on several factors: page count, font size, line spacing, etc. If I didn’t know what 16-point line spacing was, …

Being an editor is a satisfying job. It feels good to catch a typo, spot an inconsistency, or unpack garbled prose. But sometimes, we make certain fixes because … well, because that’s what we’ve always done. And we don’t stop to notice that language trends might have changed, Or that what we always thought was a rule was really a superstition. Here’s …

Cloud storage solutions. Home entertainment gadgets. Strange, blood-thirsty, zombie-like aliens? For Dragonfly editor Jason Bovberg, these topics are all in a day’s work. Jason worked for tech magazine Windows IT Pro for 17 years, starting out as a copyeditor and moving up the ranks to become senior editor. Now, he’s a freelancer who writes e-books and blog posts on everything …

We live in the digital age. More and more companies are going paperless, and our readers’ attention spans are getting smaller. It’s apparent that creating readable content is important for attracting customers. What is readability? According to Merriam-Webster, readability is the ability to read a text easily. The Center for Plain Language published an article on readability and explained why …

Writing a proposal is hard work. And getting all the details of spelling, grammar, and punctuation right can be even harder. So why burden yourself with following rules of grammar … that aren’t even rules? Here are five “fake rules of writing” that you hereby have permission to disregard. You may have heard these from your fifth-grade English teacher or …

Lately, I’ve seen a lot of talk about alternative text (alt text) in the Twitterverse. What is alt text, you ask? It’s an HTML description added to an image or GIF that’s uploaded to the internet. Why add alt tags to images? Well, those who are blind browse the web too. They use a screen reader that reads text to …

I know that 2017 is halfway through at this point. And many of the best editing conferences, like ACES 2017 and EAC 2017, have come and gone. But there are still so many great editorial training events happening between now and the end of the year. Are you planning on attending any of these? Date Place Name June 22-25 Phoenix Investigative Reporters and …